1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to educational management systems, and more particularly to a system adapted to school administrations for managing work, monitoring student progress, and determining educational trends.
2. Description of the Related Art
In a traditional setting, educators manually record homework, grades, quizzes, writing samples, etc., and submit the results to school officials and administrators, which, in turn, manually submit student, class, and school progress to the state level. Each teacher does this independently, so other teachers and school administrators have no formal mechanism for monitoring a student's progress with respect to student performance in all areas of education. Grades submitted for report cards give administrators, teachers, parents, and students an idea of how well a student performs in a given subject area for a given period of time. However, administrators do not have real-time information or knowledge with which to work. Additionally, some basic information gathered by a school might be sent to a region or to the state, but little useful information is generated at the classroom level.
Computer programs for educational purposes are known. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,496,681, issued to Linton, teaches a teaching, evaluating, and reporting computer system and method. Linton teaches a computer system that implements skills assessment and knowledge, manages the instructional segment, and provides the verification, evaluation, teaching, and reporting of the user's activity with the instructional segment. A managing system has means for broadcasting the instructional segment to a user, a means for evaluating the user's comprehension of the subject matter, and a means for reporting the user's results of the instructional segment back to an administrator.
Also, U.S. Pat. No. 6,386,883, issued to Siefert, teaches a computer-assisted education, in which a school curriculum is stored in computer repositories. Each student has a learning profile that indicates the student's capabilities, preferred style of learning, and progress. Based on this profile, an “Intelligent Administrator” selects the appropriate material for presentation during each learning session, assesses the student's performance, and then presents the material in a different way if the student has failed to master the material.
Furthermore, U.S. Pat. No. 6,092,081, issued to Alpert et al., teaches a computer system and method for storing and accessing information regarding digital portfolio projects. Alpert et al., teaches a system with a memory, a graphical user interface, and a tagging process whereby a quality weight is associated with the tag and the quality weight measures the performance of the portfolio author. After an author has submitted a portfolio entry, an evaluator selects tags (e.g., words that would be expected to be in the portfolio entry), and the selected tags are associated with the submitted portfolio entry. Alpert et al., further teaches tagged portions of the portfolio entry that are annotated by a comment selected by the evaluator from a Standardized set of evaluator comments by the respective tags.
Next, U.S. Pat. No. 5,810,605, issued to Siefert, teaches a system of educating students including repositories that hold interactive educational programs which students can access from home, via a network. Siefert also teaches learning profiles for individual students, which contain information such as student curriculum, preferred teaching strategies, present student standing, and any other significant personalized information to assist in the monitoring of student progress.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,267,865, issued to Lee, teaches an interactive and audio-visual system to encourage students to learn at their individual pace through administrative monitoring of the students' interaction with the system. Lee teaches an interactive educational method whereby students are provided with individual workstations linked via system bus, and all workstations are in constant communication with a teacher's workstation via a LAN interface. Lee teaches a system in which courseware is loaded into the workstation and is uniquely developed for each class, school, school system, or any segment of the student population so as to provide a curriculum desired by the educators using the system and method of the present invention. Students can enter their homework assignments manually by typing their answers into the workstation keyboard, and the answers are compared to the expected answers, transferred to the teacher's workstation, and stored for future use, such as to track student progress.
Last, U.S. Pat. No. 4,820,167, issued to Nobles et al., teaches an integrated system which includes a central school computer for outputting information to classroom computers, teacher computers, and individual student computers. Nobles et al., teaches individual computers called “student units” that have “read” and “test” modes, and these units can be connected to the classroom computers and teacher computers. Students use their individual computer units to do homework, study, and take tests in a variety of subjects, and connect their student unit to the teacher unit for grading and attendance.
An object of the present invention is to develop a system that can associate imputed educational data and achieve the cross-application querying of the educational data, and that has the ability to access the educational data in real-time via a “data linkage” process, whereby states, districts, schools, teachers, students, courses, and classes each have their own ID.
An object of the present invention is to develop a system to manage not only student progress but also school system (e.g., a school district) progress.
An object of the present invention is to develop a system to monitor student and school system progress and associate and track this data against local, state, and federal standards.
An object of the present invention is to develop a system that assists school systems in managing work, monitoring student progress, and determining educational trends, and associates and tracks all the imputed data against local, state, and federal standards.
The present inventive system includes a tracking system whereby each student has multiple portfolio entries, each with a unique ID, and each portfolio entry has multiple scorings and multiple files with descriptions attached, each with a unique ID.
The present inventive system can track these portfolio entries by entry, by student, by teacher, by class, by school, by district, or by state.
The present inventive system further includes a quiz manager, which runs a report for how a classroom performed as a whole on a quiz, how a particular teacher's classes performed on a quiz, how individual students performed on a quiz, and how the school, district, and state performed on a quiz.
The present inventive system includes standards managers, which define certain standards and benchmarks students must achieve through the writing portfolio and quiz entries.
Also, the present inventive system maintains data compilation of quiz grades, writing portfolio entries, attendance records, teacher biographies, and other administrative matters continually throughout the semester to maximize time and decrease excessive workloads.